We’ve announced this before and thus thought we could delete the old profile worry-free, but it turns out our message didn’t come through to many of you.

That’s a pity, because we’d really love to stay connected with you all! To exchange thoughts, findings and knowledge, share concepts on innovation in media – and maybe to help each other find that perfect new team member.

Our old profile will be deleted on March 25th. Therefore we want to make a last shout out in order to turn our ‘old connections’ into new followers:

Wouldn’t it be great to experience the Beatles play their first Hamburg gig from the perspective of a fan who danced in the front row? Or witness the fall of the Berlin Wall in a truly immersive way? The bad news: That’s still kind of tricky. The good news: It’s not impossible, and the V4Design consortium has been working on technical solutions for a full year now.

V4Design in a nutshell

Horizon 2020 project V4Design started in January 2018. One of its main goals is to recycle all sorts of 2D visuals for reuse in virtual environments. Use cases focus on architecture, design, and – this is where DW comes in – documentary film making and language acquisition. The consortium is currently developing plug-ins for Rhino 3D (a computer graphics and CAD application software) as well as add-ons for Unity (a cross-platform game engine). These extensions connect with V4Design media library items, templates, filters, and other assets that allow producers to create immersive experiences.

The original V4Design concept

From Gendarmenmarkt to Bauhaus

The first DW use case, realized with the help of software engineering experts Nurogames, is about creating an immersive documentary:

In a first step, we virtually rebuilt the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin and sifted through our 2D video and picture archives where we hoped to find enough interesting objects and characters to rehash – and thus bring the square to life in VR, in different time periods.

Although the prototype was completed successfully and the engine per se worked fine, the overall results didn’t meet our high quality standards: That’s because a lot of the footage (and basically all of the material recorded until the late 2000s) proved difficult or impossible to recycle. There wasn’t enough camera movement, there was a lack of depth, a lack of resolution, and no user generated content (UGC) available.

Hence we decided to adjust our use case: We kept the basic setup (and the original pilot), but started looking for a “fresh” topic/setting with significantly more and better coverage. Eventually, we started to focus on the 2019 Bauhaus anniversary. So far, it seems to offer all the media assets we need – and it perfectly reflects the mix of journalism, architecture, and design at the core of our project. Diving into era-defining Bauhaus surroundings is both compelling and technically impressive. Stay tuned for a couple of teasers and demos.

A participant of the 2018 Reseachers’ Night in Thessaloniki testing a V4Design prototype at the CERTH exhibition stand.

From 200 episodes to one immersive game

Our second use case, also a joint-venture with Nurogames, aims to turn a special kind of telenovela into a VR experience.

Nicos Weg is a self-study German language program featuring a combination of regular TV episodes and interactive exercises. Created by DW/DW Akademie and the Federal Employment Agency, it follows Nico Gonzalez, a young man who recently arrived in Germany. He would like to learn the local language – and understand the German way of life.

Adapting Nico for VR isn’t a walk in the park, either. On top of the “flattie goes immersive” transformation challenge, we had to deal with an enormous amount of Nico content: There are more than 200 episodes, a lot of settings, and a pretty complex didactic concept. Lessons include some 14.000 exercises and 19.000 audio files.

Our solution this time: Focus on one setting (Nico’s apartment), partly re-shoot, and do laser scans. Focus on essential language exercises. Create a reduced complexity VR serious game that is both educational and entertaining – just like the original telenovela. The Nico demo is coming a long fine and should be ready for evaluation later this year.

Scene from Nicos Weg

First official V4Design review

The efforts of the entire V4Design consortium, which also includes The Centre for Research and Technology-Hellas (CERTH) – Information Technologies Institute (ITI), KU Leuven, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Herzog & de Meuron (HdM), The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th.), Solaris Filmproduktion GbR (SFd), ArtFilms Ltd (AF), and Europeana Foundation (EF), was reviewed at the DW headquarters in Bonn just a couple of weeks ago. EU H2020 Reviewers were impressed with how the project is tackling the major challenge of content repurposing for VR. There was also praise for the smart legal concepts with regard to intellectual property and privacy – and for the overall team work.

The V4Design team

V4Design has now successfully started into its second year, which will see a lot of internal and external evaluation and – quite possibly – a first prototype of the envisioned authoring tool for Unity.

It might take a while until you’re able to meet Nico at the Indra Club in 1960 or Checkpoint Charlie in 1989 (with a couple of Breuer chairs and Wagenfeld lamps in the background) – but we’re getting there!

(Eva Lopez, Alexander Plaum)

To learn more about V4Design, check out the project’s official website and Twitter account. V4Design is looking for volunteers: If you’re interested in joining a user or focus group, send an email to eva.lopez@dw.com.

The Content Workflow Management Forum caters to all organisations involved in the production and distribution of entertainment programming. Its focus is on improving content production workflows and exploring new technologies with regard to the industry’s specific needs and challenges. The Forum is hosted by the European Branch of the Media and Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).

Why are we there?

DW will be a part of the Forum’s Localisation Technology Showcase that deals with issues like the proper implementation of machine translation tools or synthetic voices. We’ll show what our SUMMA and news.bridge platforms can contribute today – and what stakeholders can expect from the recently launched GoURMET project. Our presenter in London will be human language technology expert Peggy van der Kreeft, who’s also available for networking and Q&A sessions over a cup of (hazelnut-flavored) coffee.

With the arrival of high-end smart device cameras, sophisticated gimbals, 4G, and platforms like Twitch or Facebook Live, video live streaming has become immensely popular. Journalists have used the technology to cover breaking news right when and where they are breaking, do spontaneous interviews on a popular social media platform, or cover that really long, yet potentially important press conference both in full and on a budget. Unfortunately, journalistic live streams run the risk of becoming rather boring after a while. They might be exclusive, but they also lack dramaturgy, editing, extra features – which is why viewers tend to tune out. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Journalistic livestreams could be more compelling, and we’ve just started a new DNI project that is ready to tackle the challenge: LIMES, short for Livestreaming & Mixed Reality Management System.

Project LIMES, kicked off in January 2019 and partly funded by the Google DNI, is a joint effort of Hamburg-based media startup Contentflow and DW. Esports organizer and production company ESL, based in Cologne, serves as an external partner and beta tester.

In a nutshell, the project aims to make livestreams more appealing by adding mixed reality content layers that allow for interaction (e.g. live comments, live polling) and access to in-depth information (also via face and object recognition). The term mixed reality is used in the sense of augmented streaming ad TV technology here – think arrows, boxes, captions, and effects – not in the sense of watching a video on your tablet while wearing a HoloLens.

LIMES will benefit all kinds of digital media businesses as “pimped” streams are likely to have more reach and can be (better) monetized. Target audiences for the easy-to-use platform are editors, project managers, and producers.

The biggest LIMES test case will be DW’s Global Media Forum (GMF), an annual conference where journalists, media managers, technology experts, NGO representatives, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, civil servants and politicians get together to discuss the role of the media in a globalized world. Two instalments of the event fall into the scope of the project: GMF 2019 (scheduled for May 27th and 28th) and GMF 2020 (dates tba). While LIMES will still be under development this year, it should be fully functional for the 2020 event.

Project progress should be fast, as we’re not starting from scratch, but with a rock-solid piece of software. LIMES will be based on Contentflow, a video live streaming software built by the company of the same name. The platform already allows users to manage a vast number of streaming sources which can be put in containers and smoothly distributed across social web platforms. Contentflow also offers basic online editing, snapshot functionalities, ad server implementation, statistics, and a multi-user content management system.

DW Innovation’s role in the LIMES project will be that of a co-manager and creative consultant. We’ll work on requirements, user testing, evaluation, the GMF test case, and the dissemination of results. Hopefully, we’ll also be taking the software to our newsrooms at some point. Our colleagues at the DW lab already held a workshop involving Contentflow/LIMES earlier this month.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve probably heard of SUMMA, one of our biggest and most succesful language technology projects so far. Over the course of three years, the SUMMA consortium (= DW and 8 other partners) has built a comprehensive platform for multilingual media monitoring. But what does that mean exactly? And how will the software benefit newsrooms? Our explainer video can answer those questions in less than two minutes:

The project was officially wrapped up on January 31st, but the SUMMA website is still being maintained. Check it out for a growing collection of open source tools, academic papers, and insights on language technology.